The Republican Party, which gave us Abraham Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, William Seward in the years of the 1850s and 1860s; which gave us Theodore Roosevelt, Robert La Follette, Sr, George Norris, William Borah, Hiram Johnson in the 1900s-1940s; which gave us Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, William Scranton, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr,, George Romney in the 1950s-1960s; and which gave us Mark Hatfield, Charles Mathias, Charles Percy, Howard Baker, Bob Dole, Gerald Ford in the 1970s–1990s, reached its 159th birthday today.
The Republican Party began as an anti slavery expansion party, with elements of abolitionism also present when the party began on this day in Ripon, Wisconsin in 1854.
It became the party of civil rights legislation, three civil rights constitutional amendments, progressive legislation, and supportive of much bipartisan legislation with Democrats in the New Deal and Great Society eras.
Of course, they had their evil elements, including McCarthyism, nativism, and tying themselves to organized religious influences that wished to take America backward, but until the past few years, they always had redeeming values in many ways, and would often denounce the extremists in their midst.
But now the Republican Party has become a party dominated by Tea Party radicals, who promote racism, misogyny, nativism, concern only to promote the welfare of the wealthy, and willingness to engage in foreign wars that have cost us dearly in treasure and loss of life and limb!
The Republican Party is no longer, in any way, reflective of its past, and in fact, insults its honorable, respectable history, sullying the names of its heroes and champions over a century and a half!
This is a tragedy of massive proportions, and the name “Republican” should be co-opted by the true moderates who are sitting by, watching the destruction going on, and holding their heads in their hands, ashamed that the name has been so damaged by reckless, anarchistic haters of the federal government! The party which fought the Civil War to uphold the Union is now more like the secessionist Democrats of that era!
I’m sure you will appreciate this. After all, your language may be a little bit more sophisticated but the desire is the same. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1eUqPnYnnI
MIKE MALLOY (28 Feb 2013) I have an interest in seeing the entire Republican party DIE. I mean, on their backs, their little squiggly legs up in the air, I want to see the Republican Party dead! Just – just completely replace it with something – I know, replace it with the Tea Baggers! And let them have their little minority fun, you know, give them ten seats in the uh – in the House and one seat in the Senate give it to Ted Cruz, I just want to see the Republican Party, I mean dead, I mean literally DEAD!
Funny how you mentioned the First Great Republican President Abraham Lincoln, but you failed to mentioned the other Great Republican President Ronald Reagan. Just for your enjoyment I shall post this quote from the great Ronald Reagan. I’m sure you remember:
-I heard those speakers at that other convention saying “we won the Cold War” — and I couldn’t help wondering, just who exactly do they mean by “we”? And to top it off, they even tried to portray themselves as sharing the same fundamental values of our party! What they truly don’t understand is the principle so eloquently stated by Abraham Lincoln: “You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.”
If we ever hear the Democrats quoting that passage by Lincoln and acting like they mean it, then, my friends, we will know that the opposition has really changed. -Ronald Reagan 1992. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxL3OU1dwmI
Ronald Reagan was excellent in distorting history, and he misquoted Lincoln, who always argued for labor and for the end of slavery. Remember Reagan talked about welfare queens that never existed, and uttered many other lies, but was very good at acting the role of President. I have often said that Reagan should have won the Oscar for best acting performance of the 1980s! He is SO OVERRATED, and the attack on his record, and the inconsistencies, have already started to become evident, and even he would be outraged by what has happened to his party!
And I do not agree with the radio talk show host depiction, as we need a strong opposition party in the mainstream of American politics, and I even voted for Republicans years ago in some elections, and always respected their opposition, which was NEVER venal, and did not employ racism and misogyny and nativism as they are doing now. I want the OLD GOP back, the respectable mainstream GOP! And it will happen eventually, when the Republicans realize they have no future as an extreme right wing party!
In the first place Reagan never used the words welfare queen, just like he never used the words “trickle down economics” , I dare you to find a recording where he uses those words. What he did say during his 1976 presidential campaign,was the story of a woman from Chicago’s South Side who was arrested for welfare fraud: “She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.” Reagan’s story was 100% accurate. Linda Taylor who was finally convicted of using multiple aliases and bilking the taxpayers out of thousands of dollars. (New York Times, March 19, 1977) Reagan had made much of the woman in the 1976 campaign as an example of the “waste, fraud and abuse†that the federal and state welfare agencies engaged in. It was much disputed at the time over exactly how much she stole. The Washington Post account verified the conservatives’ charges about the woman, stating that she’d stolen over $150,000, had 26 aliases, three Social Security numbers, 30 different addresses around the city and “owned a portfolio of stocks and bonds under various names and a garage full of autos including a Cadillac, Lincoln and a Chevy wagon.†She incidentally had several dead husbands and had just returned from a trip to Hawaii, presumably to avoid the last bit of the winter of 1977. All of her ill-gotten goods were courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer. “Prosecutors say there is no category of public aid — welfare payments, rent subsidies, medical reimbursements, food stamps, transportations allowances, child-care expenses, survivors’ benefits —that Taylor had neglected to apply†for. The Post re-dubbed her, “The Chutzpa Queen.†(Washington Post, March 13, 1977, page 3.) But Reagan gave another speech in 1980, in Philadelphia, Mississippi where he says, and this is never mentioned or recalled that: “Over recent years with the best intentions, they’ve create a vast bureaucracy . . . to try and solve all the problems and eliminate all the human misery that they can. They have forgotten that when you create a government bureaucracy, no matter how well-intentioned it is, almost instantly its primary priority becomes preservation of the bureaucracy. And I know from our own experience in California when we reformed welfare. I know that one of the great tragedies in welfare in American today — and I don’t believe the stereotype, after what we did, of people in need who are there simply because they prefer to be there. We found the overwhelming majority would like nothing better than to be out, with jobs for the future, and out here in the society with the rest of us. The trouble is, again, that bureaucracy has them so economically trapped that there’s no way they can get away. And they’re trapped because that bureaucracy needs them as a clientele to preserve the jobs of the bureaucrats themselves.” Finally what you want is a leftist liberal Republican Party, so you leftist Democrats can continue winning Presidential elections.
You say ” Ronald Reagan was excellent in distorting history, and he misquoted Lincoln, who always argued for labor and for the end of slavery. ” Are you suggesting that Reagan was for slavery and against labor? What are you taking about?? Furthermore Lincoln was for “free labor”, that means that men should be allowed to keep the fruit of their labor, something that slavery as well as excessive taxation , does not permit. In the first case you are a slave to you master, in the second you end up being a “slave” to the government.
To put Reagan in the same sentence as Lincoln and TR is a slap in the face to the traditions of the Republican Party! He is the beginning of all of the problems with the national debt, tripling it in eight years!
Ron, please you should know better that to throw at me that “tripling of the debt” mantra. Imagine you have $50,000 in debt. If you earn $50,000 a year, that is a 100% debt rate. If you earn $1 million a year, that is a 5% rate. So you always have to look at the rate of debt in relation to total wealth, not the raw amount, to better understand the debt burden. Here are the actual debt figures starting at the end of World War II, based on data from usgovernmentspending.com with the percentage rate of debt:
In 1945 and the end of World War II, GDP (Gross Domestic Product, our annual national wealth) was $223 billion while the national debt was 116% of GDP ($259 billion). The high debt was a result of the huge government costs of World War II.
In 1960, at the height of the Cold War with a very strong economy and still-heavy military expenditures – roughly three times the rate of military spending today – GDP was $526 billion and the national debt was only 54.4% of that GDP. The strong economy was producing lots of revenue to the government, cutting the debt level from 15 years before, and the military budget was cut substantially from 1945.
In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected, the GDP was $2.79 trillion, and the debt was 32.6% of GDP. This low debt figure came after Jimmy Carter cut military expenditures steeply during his tenure (1977-1981). And this was at a time of maximum danger. The Soviet Union still had a huge military. Reagan promised, if elected, to turn the US military around.
In the last full year of Ronald Regan’s tenure in 1988, GDP was $5.1 trillion, and the debt was 51% of GDP. In 1995 under Clinton, GDP was $7.4 trillion and debt was 67.1%. In 2001, GDP was $10.2 trillion and debt was 56.5%. By 2005, under George Bush, GDP was $12.64 trillion and debt had grown to 62.8%.
The numbers since 2007 have been: 2007 ($14.08 trillion, 64%), 2008 ($14.44 trillion, 69.15%) 2009 ($14.26 trillion, 83.3%) and 2010 $14.62 trillion, 94.3%). Today it has reached 100% of GDP.
Notice how little GDP growth there has been over the last four years – only about 4% – but how much the debt has increased by 45% as a percentage of GDP since 2008 (69% to 100% under Obama). Yet the media and the left savage Ronald Reagan for a 59% increase in eight years that included a huge victory over the Soviets. In any event Defense spending never ever surpassed Entitlement Spending as percentage of GDP. In 1965 Defense Spending was 6.4% of GDP while Entitlements were 2.5% of GDP. 1976 was the first year entitlement spending surpassed defense spending and it has been that way since. Today entitlement spending is over 10% of GDP while defense spending is under 5% of GDP. During the Reagan era it topped at 6% of GDP while entitlements soared to 7.5% of GDP.
The liberal mantra, as you invariable repeat, always has been that “Reagan reduced tax rates on the rich and that caused the national debt to tripleâ€.
That is nonsense. Here are the numbers again: In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected, the GDP was $2.79 trillion, and the debt was 32.6% of GDP. In the last full year of Ronald Regan’s tenure in 1988, GDP was $5.1 trillion, and the debt was 51% of GDP.
So notice that the GDP increased by a whopping 82% over just 8 years under Reagan. That is a huge leap. Under Obama between 2008 and 2012, it increased only about 3%.
Reagan did cut taxes on “the rich†from 70% to 28%, a drop of 60%. By progressive/liberal accounting, that should have caused revenues to the government to fall by 60%. But revenues to the federal treasury went from $517 billion in 1980 to $991 billion in 1989, increasing by 91%. Wow! So indeed, tax cuts on the wealthy did what they always do – they produced economic growth and increased revenues.
Progressive/liberals, like you Ron, never, ever mention the huge surge in the economy in the 1980s, and the huge gains in employment, more than 20 million jobs. They only like to point out that during Reagan’s presidency the debt increased from $909 billion in 1980 when Reagan was elected to $2.857 trillion by 1989 when Reagan left office. So they always say, “Reagan tripled the national debt because he lowered tax ratesâ€.
Technically, they can say that that is true, that he tripled the debt. But if you consider the debt increase as a percentage of the whole national wealth (GDP) went from 32.6% to 51%, that is a 59% increase relative to the whole economy, not a 300% increase (tripling) like progressive/liberals say. And still, after defeating the Soviet Union with a huge military buildup, the final debt of the Reagan years was only about half (51% of GDP) of what it is today (100% of GDP).
Yet even this 59% increase in the debt was caused mostly by the Democrats in Congress. Here is how: Reagan cut top tax rates which set off an economic boom, causing huge inflows to the treasury. He then spent some of that money on the military to defeat the Soviet Union – certainly some of the best-spent dollars in American history.
But at the same time, the heavily-Democrat Congress went on a wild spending spree after promising not to, like typical Democrats (the agreement was called TEFRA. Remember this Ron, if you don’t you can search it on the internet to read about it). So it was not tax cuts that caused the debt – they caused the boom. And while military spending did cause the debt to rise somewhat, it was the Democrats’ massive spending that really caused the spike. Medicare spending in 1981 was $43.5 billion; in 1987 it hit $80 billion. Federal entitlements cost $197.1 billion in 1981—and $477 billion in 1987. Social Security spending has risen from $179 billion in 1981 to $369 billion. The Department of Education, which candidate Reagan promised to abolish along with the Department of Energy but couldn’t due to the Democrats control of Congress, more than doubled to $22.7 billion. Yet Reagan policies have historically been blamed by progressive/leftist/liberal Democrats like you and Obama only for the bad things but never for the really big accomplishments which were a booming economy and, most significantly, the defeat of Soviet communism. Well I grant you that the leftist progressive/liberals like Ted Kennedy were not to happy about this last accomplishment. As Comrade V. Chebrikov President of the Committee on State Security of the USSR (a.k.a KGB) would surely agree.
The fact is that a vast percentage of the jobs created under Reagan were LOW WAGE jobs, McDonald’s jobs, while under Clinton, it was HIGH WAGE jobs. But in your mind, any job, no matter how low paid, is an accomplishment, even if not a living wage, and poverty and homelessness grew dramatically in the Reagan years!
Now, as a good progressive/leftist/democrat, once I demonstrate your misleading argument about the debt and deficits you turn to the other mantra “low wage jobs and rise of poverty”. Oh well. as Ronaldo Magnus would say,”Here you go again”. LOL. So lets get the facts straight, once again. The poverty rate started increasing in 1978, eventually climbing by an astounding 33%, from 11.4% to 15.2%. In 1978, 9.1 percent of families and 11.4 percent of individuals in the United States were living below the poverty line. The year marked the penultimate in a previously unprecedented span of years (beginning in 1972) where the poverty rate for families fell below 10 percent. However, both rates began climbing in 1979, preceding the onset of the twin recessions of 1980 and 1982. Poverty topped out at 12.3 percent for families and 15.2 percent for individuals in 1983.
From there, though, poverty under Reagan moved downward steadily, reaching 10.4 percent for families and 13.0 percent for individuals in 1988 .The poverty rate declined every year from 1984 to 1989, dropping by one-sixth from its peak. Both rates fell further in the first year of the George H.W. Bush administration. However, neither rate would be that low again until 1997, the year after welfare reform passed Congress. The poverty rate for families would not duck below 10 percent again until the last two years of the Clinton administration and the first three years of the George W. Bush administration. A fall in real median family income that began in 1978 snowballed to a decline of almost 10% by 1982. Remember Jimmy Carter’s misery index? Real per-capita disposable income increased by 18% from 1982 to 1989, meaning the American standard of living increased by almost 20% in just seven years.
Yes Juan. Rather than admit he’s wrong he just loves to change the topic!
No, Hoopster, Juan has an “Alternative” history, manufactured by conservative think tanks, and he uses these websites to justify his “rewriting” of history, when everyone knows that the Reagan years were not good,except for the wealthy, who got major tax cuts as in the Bush II years, and don’t want to pay now for the benefits they received in the past!
No Ron. You like to make gross generalizations that supposedly “everyone knows.” When he argues your point with facts you just change the subject. Like when you tried to say that it was mainly Republicans responsible for today’s deficits. He’s not rewriting anything. If you’d like to stick to one topic and debate it I am all ears. And its asinine to say that I don’t want to pay now for breaks I got under Reagan or Bush 2.
So under Bush II, we did not double the national debt with two wars unpaid for, and a prescription drug plan unpaid for, Hoopster? And under Reagan, we did not triple the national debt due to defense spending in the 1980s, from what it was when Carter left? It is you who is delusional, not me! But this is all part of the “rewriting” of history by the conservatives! Make up all their own”history” as it goes along, and make Democrats and progressives the ones to blame for everything that occurred before they got into power!
Ron: So now the IRS, the BLS and the US Census are conservative think tanks?
Ron: To leave out Ronald Reagan as one of the greatest Republican Presidents, behind Lincoln, and perhaps one of the greatest Presidents in US history is really astounding. You write “everyone knows that the Reagan years were not good,except for the wealthy..” Do you realize how irrational that is? Reagan not only won his first election in 1980 by a landslide , but more important won his reelection in 84 by a bigger landslide!! No Democrat President has done that since Johnson in 64 and that was technically his first election,(he was running after the assassination of JFK,) because he didn’t even present himself for reelection in 68. So lets compare Reagan’s elections with Obama’s . Just, the popular vote to prove to you that the overwhelming majority of the people, rich, middle class and poor supported Reagan and his policies , while the same cannot be said of Obama. 1980 Ronald Reagan 43,903,230, 50.8% , Jimmy Carter 35,480,115, 41% and Anderson, 5,719,850, 6.6%. 1984 reelection , Ronald Reagan 54,455,472, 58.8% and Walter Mondale 37,577,35, 40.6%. Reagan got 4 years later for his reelection 10,552,242 more votes than before! Looks like not that many people realized that things were not good for the poor and middle class! But what do they know? After all a progressive professor knows a lot more! Also I never realized there were over 54 million hateful greedy millionaires back then! Now lets look at the anointed one Barack Hussein Obama. 2008 Obama 69,498,516 , 52.9% , McCain 59,948,323, 45.7%. Now lets look at his reelection in 2012. Obama 65,899,660, 51.06% and Romney 60,932,152, 47.21%. That’s 3,598,856 less votes than when he was first elected!! A massive drop in support! So contrary to Reagan, there is no landslide for Obama, he got fewer votes and even though the Republicans lost, they actually gained about 1 million votes. In an election where the base of the Republican party stayed home, in an election where the Obama machinery, the media and the unions mobilized to get people to vote, they still lost 3.5 million votes! Thus there is no mandate or is there an approval of his policies. Compare that to Reagan where 10.5 million more Americans voted for him the second time around then the first! So to leave out the most successful Conservative/Republican President of the 20th Century is simply irrational and can only be explained by an deep elitist hatred that emanates from the bottom of a progressive professor’s soul. Finally you know why Reagan was so popular? Because he was not divisive, was not hateful towards any class of Americans, nor did he promote class warfare, putting Americans against Americans, either due to their wealth, race or region. As he said in 1992 ” My fellow citizens — those of you here in this hall and those of you at home — I want you to know that I have always had the highest respect for you, for your common sense and intelligence and for your decency. I have always believed in you and in what you could accomplish for yourselves and for others. And whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts. My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty’s lamp guiding your steps and opportunity’s arm steadying your way. ”
That is something Obama has never done and never will do. He always appeals to our worst fears and doubts. Obama does not respect the American people, nor does he believe in our common sense, intelligence or decency. He believes,as you do, in government. These last few weeks have been a prime example of that.
There you go again Ron with the hyperbole. One side blames the other for everything…please.
Juan, those government agencies are NOT conservative think tanks, of course not. But you idealize Reagan and forget that not all was rosy during his times. I will concede that Reagan does rank as the fourth greatest Republican President, simply for the fact that most Republican Presidents have been truly disastrous or mediocre at best. So I have made clear when I lecture and or teach that Reagan is ranked in most polls as the 10th or 11th “best” President in American history, with only Lincoln, TR, and Ike above him, therefore making him 4th “best” Republican President. But I admit every President has negatives, and Reagan’s are a long list, although subject to interpretation, which is what historians do for a living.
And Hoopster, I am not using hyperbole, just simply stating what I see as valid.
And Juan, I totally disagree on your assessment of Obama. Just because he believes in the power of government to make life better does not mean that he does not respect us or believe in our common sense, intelligence or decency.
He does not appeal to our worst fears, as that is a Republican specialty with McCarthyism in the past and now instilling fear because an African American ” Socialist Communist Fascist Nazi Muslim” is in the White House, an absolutely despicable description offered by too many conservatives and Republicans. They lack respect for him in a way that would not be so if he was white, but of course you and other conservatives and Republicans will deny this to the heavens, that his race is not a factor, but it sure is, whether one wants to admit it or not! Give respect to the people who voted for him twice, as much as you want respect for Reagan’s two victories for the White House!
Ron – making a claim that Reagan lied about welfare queens? I guess you’re just stating there what you see as valid? Even though it’s not true. I could pick out many other ridiculous claims you’ve made above but I think best to go one at a time. It’s pretty bold when you start calling somebody a liar.
I have never said Reagan was perfect nor do I idealize him. As a matter of fact I would have preferred he’d done away with the Department of Education, which does not educate, and the Department of Energy, which does not produce a kilowatt of energy. I would have preferred he not caved on Amnesty for illegal immigrants by believing the Democrat promise to secure the border. Also I would have preferred he not cave on raising taxes, but Democrats promised for every $1 in taxes increase there would be $3 in cut. Of course that never happened and spending rose! But , I understand that Reagan was not a dictator, he was just President and power in this Republic is divided. So no, he wasn’t perfect,nor do I idealize him, no human being is, and if you understood conservative/classic liberalism, you would never claim that we idealize or think that anyone was perfect. Nevertheless I sense that 2 tremendous historical landslides for a conservative/classic liberal , is just too much to bear for many historians due to their mainly progressive/leftist liberal view of history.
As for instilling fear on the American people and your mentioning of McCarthyism I would just mention to you two things.First of all Senator McCarthy was an intimate friend of the Kennedy’s and they did not believe McCarthy was that wrong about Communist infiltration. Second, have read or heard of the Mitrokhin Archives and the Venona project?Because if you had, you would know that McCarthy was not that off about soviet infiltration. Today most try to dismiss McCarthy and talk about his investigations as if though he was nuts, and therefore they downplay or dismiss Soviet infiltration within our institutions, be it political, cultural or educational,the truth is that there has been such infiltration. And McCarthy, despite his antics, was not that wrong.
Yes, McCarthy was wrong, a drunken demagogue who destroyed many people’s lives with false accusations, and was censured by the US Senate, including many of the members of his own party, who were sick and disgusted at his tactics and accusations, including, just for example, Ralph Flanders of Vermont and Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, both conservative mainstream Republican Senators. This is what conservative propagandists are trying to do–rehabilitate McCarthy, and therefore justify Allen West and Ted Cruz in their reckless attacks on anyone who does not conform with their extreme right wing whackiness! And before you say anything, YES, there were Democrats, the southern segregationist Democrats, who supported McCarthy, but that fit into their anti civil rights stands
And the fact of Joe Kennedy and McCarthy–another nail in the coffin for Joe Kennedy, a despicable person—and Robert Kennedy’s involvement with McCarthy is a major reason why I did not support him in 1968, because I did not trust him. YES, RFK seemed to transform himself in the mid 60s, but I was never really trustful of the conversion, anymore than anyone who changes views, often for convenience and ambition, which includes Ronald Reagan for your information.
What other lies did Reagan tell? You’re already 0 for 1 with your welfare queen comment?
Reagan DID talk about a Chicago “welfare queen” during his 1976 Presidential campaign–saying she had 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and gaining $150,000 tax free income. No such person was ever found, but it helped Reagan to gain the Southern vote as it was racially tinged, with the claim that this black woman drove a Cadillac. So Reagan said this, and it helped him and continues to help Republicans, what we call the “race card”, still being used against Obama, that he is a low life who got advantages he was not “entitled to”, but then if that is the case, so did Clarence Thomas! So, Hoopster, you are O for 1, not me! But you will claim otherwise, because you refuse to accept facts as facts!
Ron: Excuse me but apparently you did not read my previous post. The woman did exist, she was not made up. Her name was Linda Taylor. She was finally convicted of using multiple aliases and bilking the taxpayers out of thousands of dollars. (New York Times, March 19, 1977). The Washington Post verified the charges about the woman, stating that she’d stolen over $150,000, had 26 aliases, three Social Security numbers, 30 different addresses around the city and “owned a portfolio of stocks and bonds under various names and a garage full of autos including a Cadillac, Lincoln and a Chevy wagon.†She incidentally had several dead husbands and had just returned from a trip to Hawaii, presumably to avoid the last bit of the winter of 1977 As for the welfare queen name, again Ronald Reagan never pronounced those words, the press did and used it. Just like “trickle down” economics, Reagan never used that term once. You know I found this video of Reagan speaking with liberal leftist college students at Yale in a very informal setting, and they somehow remind me of you. Also its very revealing as how some misconceptions and issues do not seem to change. LOL! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyMt_X6vQGU
No such person ever found? Juan just told you her name was Linda Taylor
I was looking on the internet and did not find this. In any case, even if one such person existed, it became a code word for conservatives to use the race card, when a majority of people on welfare have always been white. Reagan encouraged such generalizations and from what I have read, he did use the term in the 1976 campaign against Gerald Ford for the GOP nomination.
You must not have tried very hard. Just google “Linda Taylor welfare queen”. You’ll find among other things a Dec 1974 issue of Jet magazine talking about her case. The charges changed over time but he wasn’t making it up (ie lying)?
Like I said, 0 for 1.
Regarding McCarthy , the issue is not about rehabilitating McCarthy, he had terrible flaws. The issue is not to forget, or dismiss as a fallacy the Soviet infiltration in the US. And that is what the left does when the criticize , and rightly do, McCarthy’s abuse, but they omit the fact that there really was a Soviet communist infiltration on all levels. And that is what I am saying. That is why I asked if you read about the Mitrokhin Archives and the Venona project. Now to compare Ted Cruz with McCarthy is seriously laughable. There were questions that Hagel was not even capable of answering. Especially the one concerning his Al-Jazzerra interview. But that is what leftist always do, as Alinsky taught, pick a target and destroy it.I think you will enjoy this interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX3EZCVj2XA
I looked up and found an article that said Linda Taylor was convicted of stealing $8,000, not $150,000 and that the case was exaggerated. It was one isolated case, but became a way for Reagan to exploit the race card, making people think African Americans were the majority on welfare, and that they were stealing us wild, while most have always been white, and the amount they gain is not enough to bring up children in a proper way, but people love to say that single mothers have children to get “all that welfare”, as if they are living off the “fruit of the vine”.
The true “welfare queens” are those corporations getting billions of tax payer dollars, and often paying no or low corporate taxes. We care more about welfare, when it is a miniscule part of the national budget, but allow ourselves to let Walmart make the taxpayer pay for their workers’ health care benefits, and subsidize oil companies, as just examples. A strange sense of priorities!
And Juan, Republicans are the true masters of character assassination and love to destroy those who want change, not the oligarchy which controls more of the wealth distribution now than ever in American history, and benefited handsomely under Reagan and Bush II, while the middle class dwindled rapidly!
I’m sure you will find this lecture interesting..: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZHRgTskEhE
Ron: I love it when your Peronist gene bursts into action! LOL “oligarchy which controls more of the wealth distribution” !!!
For you! The Peronist March! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOfTyT7wLck
We, the Peronists
All united will stand
And as always we will
Sing our hearts out
¡Viva Perón! ¡Viva Perón!
Because of that great Argentine
That knew how to conquer
The Argentinean masses
Fighting against capital.
¡Perón, Perón, how great you are!
¡My general, how worthy you are!
¡Perón, Perón, our great leader,
You are the first working man!
Because of the social principles
That Perón has established
The people are united and singing their hearts out:
¡Viva Perón! ¡Viva Perón!
Because of that great Argentinean man
that worked tirelessly
so in the people may rule
love and equality.
¡Perón, Perón, how great you are!
¡My general, how worthy you are!
¡Perón, Perón, our great leader,
You are the first working man!
Let’s imitate the example
Of this great Argentinean man
And following his path
Let’s sing our hearts out:
¡Viva Perón! ¡Viva Perón!
Because that great Argentina
That San MartÃn dreamed of
Is the effective reality
That we owe to Perón.
¡Perón, Perón, how great you are!
¡My general, how worthy are you!
¡Perón, Perón, our great leader,
You are the first working man!
You are trying to use the typical right wing tactics against me, Juan, and I am not going to be intimidated by your bully tactics, so IF you continue, I will decide not to publish or to remove any and all postings of yours in the future, as if we cannot be civilized in our discussion, and that goes for everyone who wishes to comment on this blog, then you will lose your “bully pulpit”! You sound more and more like a Ted Cruz, a Lindsey Graham, a Rand Paul, etc, and this blog will not allow their propaganda to be spewed here! So future participation is up to you, and I would rather have a respectful discussion with you! Please return to your former behavior!
And what I said about wealth concentration being the greatest in American history, worse than Great Britain, which had been the leader for a long time, is correct!
Gee Ron.. where is your sense of humor?? LOL.. You are the one who brought up such archaic terms as “Oligarchy”.. I mean when I read it I couldn’t help laughing and the Peronist mantra just jumped to my mind. I grew up with it you know! I really don’t understand why you are so offended. After all Peronism shares basically the same values as progressivism such as “social justice”, “wealth redistribution” , “big government or statism”, “hatred for the so called Oligarchs” (that’s so 19th century LOL!), “pro-unions” , “populism”, “progressive taxation”, “hiper-regulated capitalism” , ” Keynesianism” , and this last one you will love, Peron actually incorporated FDR Second Bill of Rights within the 1949 Argentine Constitution! Now maybe I am wrong and this Peronist March was not what really upset you, maybe what really upset you were the Yuri Bezmenov interviews that I posted..? I’m intrigued. In any event it was not my intention to offend you in any way whatsoever. Finally regarding your constant regurgitation about wealth concentration and distribution I will let Maggie Thatcher once again reply to you and all the progressive leftist liberal. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okHGCz6xxiw And by the way, learn to laugh as the Brits do!! I thought you libs where supposed to be the happy and tolerant bunch! LOL!
Yes, I believe in social justice, pro union, progressive taxation, Keynesianism, and civil liberties, and do not apologize for that. And despite what Peron did, what is wrong with FDR’s Second Bill of Rights? I was just disturbed by your tendency to character assassinate, but I accept your apology because I actually enjoy our repartee! Liberals are happy and tolerant, but frustrated by the dirty tactics of so many right wingers who love to stir fear and hate of any progressive change!
And I am NOT a Socialist, but realize how much of the social safety network comes from Socialism, and I argue that is for the good. I am a proud progressive and liberal in the tradition of Robert La Follette Sr, George Norris, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Hubert H. Humphrey.
She existed. You’re 0 for 1.
So I am 0 for 1, big deal! As if everything you believe is true, and you discover you are wrong at times. The point is that Reagan exaggerated the issue, and the person involved was a small time violator, but it helped the GOP to win the South regularly based on racial bias. Is that something to be proud of? If you think so, Hoopster, that says legions about your and your values. Especially, when a majority of people on welfare are white!
Reagan won the South based on racial issues? That’s just a load full of crap! LOL!!! As I posted somewhere else, the mythmakers would have you believe that your white-hooded hillbilly trailer-dwelling tornado-bait voters jumped ship because LBJ signed a civil-rights bill (passed on the strength of disproportionately Republican support in Congress). The facts suggest otherwise.: The Democrats actually began losing the “solid South†in the late 1930s — at the same time as they were picking up votes from northern blacks. The Civil War and the sting of Reconstruction had indeed produced a political monopoly for southern Democrats that lasted for decades, but the New Deal had been polarizing. It was very popular in much of the country, including much of the South — Johnson owed his election to the House to his New Deal platform and Roosevelt connections — but there was a conservative/classic liberal backlash against it, and that backlash eventually drove New Deal critics to the Republican party. Likewise, adherents of the isolationist tendency in American politics, which is never very far from the surface, looked askance at what Bob Dole would later famously call “Democrat wars†(a factor that would become especially relevant when the Democrats under Kennedy and Johnson committed the United States to a very divisive war in Vietnam). The tiniest cracks in the Democrats’ southern bloc began to appear with the backlash to FDR’s court-packing scheme and the recession of 1937. Republicans would pick up 81 House seats in the 1938 election, with West Virginia’s all-Democrat delegation ceasing to be so with the acquisition of its first Republican. Kentucky elected a Republican House member in 1934, as did Missouri, while Tennessee’s first Republican House member, elected in 1918, was joined by another in 1932. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Republican party, though marginal, began to take hold in the South — but not very quickly: Dixie would not send its first Republican to the Senate until 1961, with Texas’s election of John Tower. There is no question that Republicans in the 1960s and thereafter hoped to pick up the angry populists who had delivered several states to Wallace. That was Patrick J. Buchanan’s portfolio in the Nixon campaign. But in the main they did not do so by appeal to racial resentment, direct or indirect. The conservative ascendency of 1964 saw the nomination of Barry Goldwater, a western libertarian who had never been strongly identified with racial issues one way or the other, but who was a principled critic of the 1964 act and its extension of federal power. Goldwater had supported the 1957 and 1960 acts but believed that Title II and Title VII of the 1964 bill were unconstitutional, based in part on a 75-page brief from Robert Bork, which I have personally read for a paper I had to write. But far from extending a welcoming hand to southern segregationists, he named as his running mate a New York representative, William E. Miller, who had been the co-author of Republican civil-rights legislation in the 1950s. The Republican platform in 1964 was hardly attractive for Klansmen: It spoke of the Johnson administration’s failure to help further the “just aspirations of the minority groups†and blasted the president for his refusal “to apply Republican-initiated retraining programs where most needed, particularly where they could afford new economic opportunities to Negro citizens.†Other planks in the platform included: “improvements of civil rights statutes adequate to changing needs of our times; such additional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of the right to vote; continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed, national origin or sex.†And Goldwater’s fellow Republicans ran on a 1964 platform demanding “full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes, to assure equal rights and opportunities guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen.†Some dog whistle. See: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25840 . Of course there were racists in the Republican party. There were racists in the Democratic party. The case of Johnson is well documented, while Nixon had his fantastical panoply of racial obsessions, touching blacks, Jews, Italians (“Don’t have their heads screwed onâ€), Irish (“They get mean when they drinkâ€), and the Ivy League WASPs he hated so passionately (“Did one of those dirty bastards ever invite me to his f***ing men’s club or goddamn country club? Not onceâ€). But the legislative record, the evolution of the electorate, the party platforms, the keynote speeches — none of them suggests a party-wide Republican about-face on civil rights. Neither does the history of the black vote. While Republican affiliation was beginning to grow in the South in the late 1930s, the GOP also lost its lock on black voters in the North, among whom the New Deal was extraordinarily popular. By 1940, Democrats for the first time won a majority of black votes in the North. This development was not lost on Lyndon Johnson, who crafted his Great Society with the goal of exploiting widespread dependency for the benefit of the Democratic party. Unlike the New Deal, a flawed program that at least had the excuse of relying upon ideas that were at the time largely untested and enacted in the face of a worldwide economic emergency, Johnson’s Great Society was pure politics. Johnson’s War on Poverty was declared at a time when poverty had been declining for decades, and the first Job Corps office opened when the unemployment rate was less than 5 percent. Congressional Republicans had long supported a program to assist the indigent elderly, but the Democrats insisted that the program cover all of the elderly — even though they were, then as now, the most affluent demographic, with 85 percent of them in households of above-average wealth. Democrats such as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Anthony J. Celebrezze argued that the Great Society would end “dependency†among the elderly and the poor, but the programs were transparently designed merely to transfer dependency from private and local sources of support to federal agencies created and overseen by Johnson and his political heirs (Obama). In the context of the rest of his program, Johnson’s unexpected civil-rights conversion looks less like an attempt to empower blacks and more like an attempt to make clients of them. Republicans did begin to win some southern House seats, and in many cases segregationist Democrats were thrown out by southern voters in favor of civil-rights Republicans. One of the loudest Democratic segregationists in the House was Texas’s John Dowdy, a bitter and buffoonish opponent of the 1964 reforms. Dowdy was thrown out in 1966 in favor of a Republican with a very respectable record on civil rights, a little-known figure by the name of George H. W. Bush. As I wrote in another post and I will repost here. If the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on civil rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral results in the years following the Democrats’ 1964 about-face on the issue of segregation. Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one would ever change parties. Nor did the segregationist constituencies that elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans: The remaining 20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were replaced by Democrats. It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a century before those seats went Republican. If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to do so. They say things move slower in the South — but not that slow. It was in fact not until 1995 that Republicans represented a majority of the southern congressional delegation — and they had hardly spent the Reagan years campaigning on the resurrection of Jim Crow. As I wrote before it was not the Civil War but the Cold War that shaped mid-century partisan politics.The Republican party had long been staunchly anti-Communist, but the post-war era saw that anti-Communism energized and looking for monsters to slay, both abroad — in the form of the Soviet Union and its satellites — and at home, in the form of the growing welfare state, the “creeping socialism†conservatives dreaded. By the middle 1960s, the semi-revolutionary Left was the liveliest current in U.S. politics, and Republicans’ unapologetic anti-Communism (Reagan among them)— especially conservatives’ rhetoric connecting international socialism abroad with the welfare state at home — left the Left with nowhere to go but the Democratic party. Vietnam was Johnson’s war, but by 1968 the Democratic party was not his alone. Richard Nixon kicked off his historic comeback in 1966 with a column on the South that declared we would build our Republican Party on a foundation of states rights, human rights, small government and a strong national defense, and leave it to the “party of Maddox, Mahoney and Wallace (that is the Democrat Party) to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.†In that ’66 campaign, Nixon – who had been thanked personally by Dr. King for his help in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957 – endorsed all Republicans, except members of the John Birch Society. In 1968, Nixon chose Spiro Agnew for vice president. Why? Agnew had routed George Mahoney for governor of Maryland but had also criticized civil-rights leaders who failed to condemn the riots that erupted after the assassination of MLK. The Agnew of 1968 was both pro-civil rights and pro-law and order. When the ’68 campaign began, Nixon was at 42 percent, Humphrey at 29 percent, Wallace at 22 percent. When it ended, Nixon and Humphrey were tied at 43 percent, with Wallace at 13 percent. The 9 percent of the national vote that had been peeled off from Wallace had gone to Humphrey. And that was the racist vote. Mindful of the long-term realignment already under way in the South, Johnson informed Democrats worried about losing it after the 1964 act that “those states may be lost anyway.†Subsequent presidential elections bore him out: Nixon won a 49-state sweep in 1972, and, with the exception of the post-Watergate election of 1976, Republicans in the following presidential elections would more or less occupy the South like Sherman. Bill Clinton would pick up a handful of southern states in his two contests, and Barack Obama had some success in the post-southern South, notably Virginia and Florida.The Republican ascendancy in the South is associated with the rise of the southern middle class, the increasingly trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the welfare state, the Vietnam controversy and the rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and the incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic party (McGovern-Obama). Individual events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the Republican party. Democrats might argue that some of these concerns — especially welfare and crime — are “dog whistles†or “code†for race and racism, but this criticism is shallow in light of the evidence and the real saliency of those issues among U.S. voters of all backgrounds and both parties for decades. Indeed, Democrats who argue that the best policies for black Americans are those that are soft on crime and generous with welfare are engaged in much the same sort of cynical racial calculation President Johnson was practicing when he informed skeptical southern governors that his plan for the Great Society was “to have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.†Johnson’s crude racism is, happily, largely a relic of the past, but his strategy endures.
You’re right, he was a racist.
Oh an by the way, no one is denying that the majority of welfare recipients in gross numbers are white, indeed that is the case, therefore if conservatives/classic liberals want welfare reform it is because , 1. it promotes dependency and 2. the programs are broke and the unfunded future liabilities surpass the $100 trillion! It has nothing to do with race. But that train of though is impossible to obtain and develop for someone brought up with a liberal/progressive/leftist mindset that sees every issue through the specter of race! What was it that MLK said about being judge by the content of your character and not your race? But in any event you know very well the the majority of the population in the US is white, while African-American are only 20%, therefore in gross numbers white will always surpass African-Americans as welfare recipients. The question is , as a percentage how many people within the African-American community depend on welfare and how many whites within the white community are? And since we see welfare as causing more harm than good, your answers to my question will reveal which community is being more harmed by the state dependency programs.
Juan, a very good, incisive discussion, and I commend you on it! 🙂 I would still contend, however, that there was a veiled racism in the GOP campaigns from 1968 on, no matter what went on otherwise.
To say that the Democrats want welfare to continue is unjustified, but there are people who need government support due to their circumstances. I am NOT in favor of welfare as a way of life, and I would contend that Obama feels the same way! Of course, I know that you disagree, par for the course! LOL
The goal should be to make available decent paying jobs so NO ONE has to accept government support, but without a living wage and spending on education, the welfare system will never end. Investments must be made, and right now, the opposition is out to cut education funding!
Ron we have been spending on education. Look at how much the federal government has spent on education since 1970! And education has declined! Can you seriously say that we need more spending? I don’t think more spending will solve the issue. See: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1970_2010USb_13s1li111lcn_20t
I realize that, but cutting funding is not going to make things better, now is it? We need better parenting, obviously, and to pay teachers higher salaries and demand more from them in results!
Maybe spend more intelligently and no so much on paper pushers? Evidently all this massive spending did not produce optimal results. So I don’t think that if we continue doing the same thing again and again things are going to change. The truth is we have invested in education, but the results don’t show it.