--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, sgrayatlarge <no_re...@...> wrote: > > The Arafat reference were towards the end of the article, > and if my biases are that apparent then it is what it is. > Perhaps others will comment on other parts of Parry's > article. I may not be that familiar with Parry, however, > I didn't see much new ground covered.
I didn't either. He writes: > Washington's conventional wisdom for explaining the > intensity of Republican obstructionism toward President > Barack Obama breaks down one of two ways: either it's a > philosophical disagreement over the role of government > or a desperate need to stay in line with a radicalized > right-wing base. Not sure who he's been reading, but-- > But there is another way to view the GOP political > strategy, as neither principled nor reactive to the > rantings of Tea Partiers, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. > It is that the Republicans are following a playbook > that has evolved over more than four decades, to regain > power by sabotaging Democratic presidents. --this is what I've been seeing from pretty mainstream Democrats. It's certainly not some new revelation Parry came up with. Here's where he goes WAY off track: > Having covered CIA destabilization campaigns in Third > World countries, particularly Nicaragua, I was struck > by the similarities. In the 1980s, the Reagan-Bush-41 > administrations destroyed Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista > revolution by systematically making the country > ungovernable via a combination of economic dislocations, > political/media propaganda, and paramilitary activities. Some *30,000* people died in that conflict. The notion that this was anything like what's been going on in the U.S. is just bonkers. > By early fall 1994, the anti-Clinton hysteria was > sweeping the country, though Democrats were mostly > oblivious to its ferocity. A whole lot of people were oblivious to it. Clinton's approval ratings were evenly split at the time of the '94 election. > While some Washington pundits see the Republicans as > captives of the extremism on the Right - unable to > dismount a dangerous tiger - the counter-analysis would > be that the GOP and the Tea Party/militia crowd are just > two parts of the same political movement, one inside the > system and the other outside, but both working toward > the same goal, a restoration of Republican/Right control > of government. This *might* work if he hadn't included the militia movement, which shares some GOP goals but is strongly anti-government in general. And extreme fringe groups like the Hutaree, which he attempts to associate with the Republicans, are working for the destruction of government, period. Even the militia groups have backed away from the Hutaree. The militia groups are more concerned with protecting themselves *from* government than with either destroying government or electing any particular party to power. Also, there are plenty of Republicans who *are* trying to "dismount the tiger" of the Tea Party. I guess my biggest beef with this piece is his scare tactics, invoking a vision of widespread, uncontrolled violence and social breakdown a la Nicaragua, led or at least inspired by the GOP. That's just not even dimly in prospect. He needs to focus more on the spinelessness of the Democrats in Congress and the White House, who are letting the GOP largely get away with this appalling obstructionism, and make the point that the whole standoff, on both sides, is a function of increasing corporate control of the levers of power.
