#post-Nixon Republican rebirth

[sjohnson24]

Trump’s ‘Flashpoint of Violence’?

A federal prosecutor, Frank Figliuzzi, used a term yesterday that law enforcement employs in referring to the suspects involved in workplace violence, either before or after the fact of murderous rampages. It’s called “flashpoint of violence,” and he fears that the Donald Trump is nearing it.

Only Trump is the President of the United States, with a nuclear arsenal at his fingertips. As I’ve said for some time, when Trump goes down, he’ll take as many people with him as he can. That may well take the form of the use of nuclear weapons.

How did the United States go from the ‘leader of the free world’ to the most feared country in the world? We the people refused to face the fact and address the causes of America’s decline before it became too late. We were too caught up in our own self-pursuits. Those who still care at all became focused on ‘battles we can win,’ rather than speak to the deeper issues.

Denialism continues to rule. Joe Scarborough, the Republican host along with Democrat Mika Brzezinski of “Morning Joe,” ludicrously wrote yesterday in the Washington Post, “Historians will remember Barack Obama as the most significant president since Abraham Lincoln.”

No, historians will remember Barack Obama (as Scarborough contradictorily said earlier in the same op-ed), as the president whose “reflexive reaction to Bush’s military adventurism (“don’t do stupid shit”) led to U.S. inaction in the face of some 500,000 Syrian deaths and the greatest refugee crisis since World War II.”

Obama will also be remembered as an interregnum between Bush and Trump. He refused to hold the Bush Administration accountable for illegally invading Iraq, for its enabling a massive ‘Blackwater’ type mercenary complex, and for Guantanamo and the franchising of torture.

As a friend in town said recently, “we don’t have functioning democracy at any level in this country now.” Locally, authorities are hiring outside experts and making insular decisions on rebuilding Paradise. Fore example, they’re absurdly planning on the short-term fix of putting 2500- gallon plastic water tanks on top of every house rather than restoring the water infrastructure.

Liberals and progressives (which may be a distinction without a difference) continue to believe that the American people and polity are intact, that Donald Trump is an anomaly, and that the status quo ante will be restored when Trump is defeated in 2020 or impeached and convicted before.

“Things were worse during the Nixon era,” they intone, “and much worse at other times in American history, such as during the Civil War.”

The present parlous condition of the country is worse because despite the terrors and travails of the past, the people were still intact, and were capable of moral outrage.

Nothing surprises us anymore except goodness. Indeed, we’ve come to expect the worst, and assume we’ll get more of it. By the laws of nature, that condition cannot long last.

To meet any problem, one must first see things as they are, not as we want to see them. Donald Trump is merely the worst example of Americans believing that reality is what they want to believe it is. That habit and condition infects the entire culture and body politic to one degree or another.

We have to face the fact that we don’t have a functioning democracy in America because the people have perished, not because we have this poor excuse for a man and human being as president. Facing the fact, there can be a rebirth; continuing to deny it, and things can only get worse.

The urgency of the situation goes beyond America however, and even beyond the crisis of Western civilization (as Western intellectuals are quick to self-flagellate). The crisis is of human consciousness itself, and the dysfunctional democracies (which include India) are enfolded within the global crisis of consciousness.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. often said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

This has become wishful thinking. Though there have been exceptions, both individually nationally, the darkness at the heart of man is cumulative, and the human spirit is suffocating because so few people face and learn from the darkness within.

As the fiasco of Brexit demonstrates, and as even one of Theresa May’s ruling Conservative government, Sam Gyimah said, We have no idea where we are going.”

Nation-states have become a Procrustean bed in a global world. The world is one chaotically interconnected society. We have to first see and address it as such before national and local crises can be adequately addressed.

Question together, listen for insight, and pour the foundation a true global order. Because there is no escape, and a flashpoint of violence is inevitable.

Martin LeFevre

[goarticletec-blog]

George H.W. Bush, 41st US president, dies at 94

New Post has been published on https://www.articletec.com/george-h-w-bush-41st-us-president-dies-at-94/

George H.W. Bush, 41st US president, dies at 94

Former US President George Bush visits a tent camp for earthquake survivors on the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan, in January 2006. Bush, 81 at the time, came as a special envoy for the United Nations to speak with survivors of an earthquake that killed more than 75,000 and left another 3.5 million homeless. 

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George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st president of the United States, whose long life in the public sphere was defined by service to his country, has died.  He was 94. 

His wife of 73 years, Barbara Bush, died in April and Bush was hospitalized the day after the funeral for an infection in his bloodstream. He suffered a number of health issues in his later years, including vascular parkinsonism, a condition similar to Parkinson’s disease, and used a wheelchair to get around.

His son, former President George W. Bush, issued a statement calling his father “a man of the highest character and the best dad a son or daughter could ask for. The entire Bush family is deeply grateful for 41’s life and love, for the compassion of those who have cared and prayed for Dad, and for the condolences of our friends and fellow citizens.”

On June 12, 2018, Bush celebrated his 94th birthday with family members in Kennebunkport, Maine, becoming the first US president in history to reach that age. “I see history as a book with many pages, and each day we fill a page with acts of hopefulness and meaning,” he said in his 1989 inauguration speech.

Born into privilege, then a life of service

Bush was born in Milton, Mass., on June 12, 1924. On his 18th birthday, he enlisted in the Navy, becoming the youngest fighter pilot in World War II. He flew 58 combat missions, including one that nearly ended his life.

“He was on a bombing mission about 600 miles south of Japan,” said historian Douglas Brinkley, “when he was shot down and it went into the sea. And it’s a great moment for his life of heroism, September 3, 1944.”

He returned from war with a Distinguished Flying Cross. A year later, he was at Yale University and courting the young woman he met at a Christmas dance.

In January 1945, he married Barbara Pierce. They said it was love at first sight. “I think he’s the wisest, smartest, most decent, caring person I know, and I think he’s the handsomest thing I ever laid my eyes on,” Barbara Bush once said.

Former presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush at dedication ceremonies for the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas in 2013. 

Paul Moseley/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/MCT via Getty Images

Together they left the East Coast and headed south to Texas. George and Barbara had six children. Robin, their first daughter, died in 1953 of leukemia. She was not yet 4 years old.

“It had a profound effect on me,” Bush recalled. “And I think that horrible incident drew us even closer together.”

Six years later, another daughter, Dorothy, was born, joining sons George W., John Ellis (known as Jeb), Neil, and Marvin. It also marked a rebirth for Bush as well, as he embarked on a career in politics.

The East Coast moderate would have mixed success with Texas conservatives. He won two terms in Congress and lost two Senate races. But his journey would ultimately bring him to Washington.

He served Presidents Nixon and Ford in a host of high-level positions: UN ambassador, head of the Republican Party, envoy to China and director of the CIA.

After a contentious 1980 primary season and a failed bid for the presidential nomination, Bush’s opponent, Ronald Reagan, surprised the party by choosing Bush as his running mate.

“When you read Ronald Reagan’s diaries,” Brinkley said, “you’ll get to see how much he relied on George Bush. And when Reagan left after two terms, he was very much for George Herbert Walker Bush becoming his successor.”

In a speech accepting the 1988 Republican presidential nomination, Bush described America as a nation of communities, “a brilliant diversity, spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.”

The former fighter pilot waged a fierce battle against Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis and won.

As the 41st president of the United States, George Herbert Walker Bush was inheriting a rapidly changing world. The Berlin Wall had fallen; the communist empire was disintegrating; and in Panama, American troops rooted out a corrupt regime, overthrowing Manuel Noriega’s government.

But the battle with Saddam Hussein had just begun. When Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait, President Bush assembled a global coalition, waging an air and ground campaign known as Operation Desert Storm. Kuwait was liberated in just six weeks. President Bush didn’t order US troops to press on to Baghdad, fearing a long war.

“George Herbert Walker Bush was the finest foreign policy president the United States had after Harry Truman. And I don’t say that lightly,” said historian Brinkley.

Yet concerns closer to home preoccupied many Americans, and the economy would pose a daunting challenge to his leadership.

On the campaign trail for reelection in 1992, Bush would face not one but two opponents: Democrat Bill Clinton and Independent Ross Perot, who would hammer home the notion that Bush was out of touch with the problems of everyday Americans.

“Read my lips … no new taxes,” Bush famously promised as he accepted the presidential nomination in 1988.

Four years later, that promise would come back to haunt him. He did, in fact, raise taxes, infuriating the base of the Republican party — the Reagan conservatives who never quite trusted the East Coast Ivy Leaguer.

“I couldn’t do what Ronald Reagan, my friend and predecessor, had done so well — communicate effectively with the people,” Bush said in an interview. “And that was my biggest shortcoming.”

Life beyond the White House

After leaving the White House, Bush forged a friendship with former president Bill Clinton. The two raised millions for victims of Hurricane Katrina and a devastating tsunami in southeast Asia. 

“People say now that they can’t tell the difference between me and President Bush anymore and, oh yes you can. I’m the one who has more gray hair,” Clinton joked.

Bush’s son George would serve as the governor of Texas and two terms as president, while another son, Jeb, became the first Republican governor of Florida to serve two full terms.

George Herbert Walker Bush was the patriarch of a political dynasty. But his legacy is not of power, but of service.

“He easily could have chosen a life of comfort and privilege, and instead, time and again, when offered a chance to serve, he seized it,” President Barack Obama said of him in 2009, marking the 20th anniversary of Bush’s Points of Light initiative. “Think for a minute about the impact that he’s had. … That’s the extraordinary ripple effect that one life, lived humbly, with love for one’s country, and in service to one’s fellow citizens, can have. May we each strive to make that kind of difference with our own lives.”

This story originally posted as “George H.W. Bush, 41st president, dies at 94” on CBSNews.com.

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[thenewdemocratus]

Richard Nixon Foundation: Pat Buchanan- 1968: The Year The Silent Majority Was Born

Richard Nixon Foundation: Pat Buchanan- 1968: The Year The Silent Majority Was Born

Source: Richard Nixon Foundation

Source: This piece was originally posted at The New Democrat

I believe you have to understand the 1960s and 1967-68 especially to understand the great political comeback of Richard Nixon and the rebirth of the Republican Party. Once you know what this time was and what it was about and how it benefited Richard Nixon you’ll also understand how brilliant of a…

[patriotnewsblogger-blog]

It’s Trump’s Party Now

New Post has been published on http://www.therightnewsnetwork.com/its-trumps-party-now/

It’s Trump’s Party Now

Before the largest audience of his political career, save perhaps his inaugural, Donald Trump delivered the speech of his life.

And though Tuesday’s address may be called moderate, even inclusive, Trump’s total mastery of his party was on full display.

Congressional Republicans who once professed “free trade” as dogmatic truth rose again and again to cheer economic nationalism.

“We’ve lost more than one-fourth of our manufacturing jobs since NAFTA was approved,” thundered Trump, “and we’ve lost 60,000 factories since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.”

Yet a Republican party that embraced NAFTA and voted MFN for China every time it came up gave Trump standing ovations.

“[W]e have inherited a series of tragic foreign policy disasters,” said Trump, “America has spent approximately six trillion dollars in the Middle East—all the while our infrastructure at home is crumbling.”

And from congressional Republicans who backed every Bush-Obama war—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen—not a peep of protest, as their foreign-policy legacy was being consigned to the dumpster.

Watching Republicans rise again and again to hail Trump called to mind the Frankish King Clovis who, believing his wife’s Christian God had interceded to give him victory over the Alemanni, saw his army converted by the battalions and baptized by the platoons.

One had thought the free-trade beliefs of Republicans were more deeply rooted than this.

“We have withdrawn the United States from the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership,” Trump exulted, having just tossed into the trash that mammoth trade deal beloved of Bush Republicans.

GOP champions of the TPP, if there are any left, sat mute.

Trump cited the first Republican president, Lincoln, as having got it right when he warned, “abandonment of the protective policy by the American Government [will] produce want and ruin among our people.”

Celebrating protectionism, hailing “America First!” in a virtual State of the Union address—it doesn’t get any better than this.

To open-borders Republicans who backed amnesty for 11 million illegal immigrants, Trump had this message: “We will soon begin the construction of a great wall along our southern border.”

And the cheering did not stop.

The president invoked Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System, the greatest public-works project of the 20th century, as a model.

Yet Ike was opposed by the Taft wing of his party and Ike’s republicanism gave birth to the modern conservative movement.

Yet in leading Republicans away from globalism to economic nationalism, Trump is not writing a new gospel. He is leading a lost party away from a modernist heresy—back to the Old-Time Religion.

In restating his commitment to the issues that separated him from the other Republicans and won him Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, however, Trump reaffirmed aspects of conservatism dear to his audience.

He committed himself to regulatory reform, freeing up the private sector, rolling back the administrative state. The Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines are on the way to completion. And Trump is all behind school choice.

While the speech was unifying and aspirational, the president set goals and laid down markers by which his presidency will be judged.

And none will be easy of attainment.

“Dying industries will come roaring back to life. … Crumbling infrastructure will be replaced with new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports and railways. … Our terrible drug epidemic will slow down and, ultimately, stop. … Our neglected inner cities will see a rebirth of hope, safety and opportunity.”

As some of these domestic crises are rooted in the character, or lack of it, of people, they have proven, since Great Society days, to be beyond the capacity of government to solve.

Ronald Reagan was not wrong when he said, “Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.”

And while the president’s speech astonished critics as much as it reassured friends, it leaves large questions unanswered.

How does one leave Social Security and Medicare untouched, grow defense by more than $50 billion, slash taxes, launch a $1 trillion infrastructure program—and not explode the deficit and national debt?

Now that we are ensnared in wars all over the Middle East, how do we extricate ourselves and come home without our enemies filling the vacuum?

How does the GOP repeal and replace Obamacare without cutting the benefits upon which millions of Americans have come to rely?

How do you eliminate an $800 billion merchandise trade deficit without tariffs that raise the price of cheap imports from abroad—on which Trump’s working-class voters have come to depend?

The Republican establishment today bends the knee to Caesar.

But how long before K Street lobbyists for transnational cartels persuade the GOP elite, with campaign contributions, to slow-walk the president’s America First agenda?

Tuesday’s speech established Trump as the man in charge.

But how loyal to him and his program will be the “deep state,” which dominates this city that gave Trump only 4 percent of its votes and, paranoically, believes him to be an agent of Vladimir Putin?

The Trump-Beltway wars have only just begun.

Patrick J. Buchanan is a founding editor of The American Conservative and the author of the book The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority.

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[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

This isn’t a comedy video this is a straight forward explanation of how the Republicans turned themselves around after Nixon by recruiting mainly southern racists. Then it explains how low-IQ Crooked Donald came along and was able to capture the hearts and minds of people as dumb as him. Speaking on a third grade level he appealed to the poorly educated and low IQ voters by appearing to be a successful version of them. He gave them a voice and they admire his ability to get away with virtually anything leading them to be unflappable members of his cult.

I highly recommend this 6 minute youtube video. It very plainly and succinctly explains the rise of the new Republican Party, post-Nixon, and the rise of Trumpism.

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